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this is what I have currently; a page filled with about 100+ images/items. The user is to choose an image/item and rank them (this one is 1-3). However...the only setback at the moment is that they are able to choose the same person for all rankings. What I am looking for is a way to link the inputs: if rank 1 is chosen for an image/item, it is not available for the other choices. If rank 1 is not chosen, they cant choose rank 2 or 3,. etc.

yeah, I know my php could be better....at the moment, Im just running this as a testing page- just to see if I can get things to work

The problem with grouping the items like that is that I have over 100 images/items that need to be ranked per category (on a scale of 1-3, or 1-5).

By grouping the buttons, it removes any possibility for me to choose any item as rank 2, if something was rank 1. I guess it would be something with the select options: if you click on a certain state, the other select could be populated by the counties, and then the next could be by cities.

The only difference is that I am looking to allow it to be linked in such a way where the rank 1 item can not be ranked again in that particular category, but I am able to rank the other items in the following rankings. (hope that makes sense)

Everything is being sent through post to voteadd.php, which then fits the values (rank1, rank2, rank3) into separate tables to be called up later in another page.

Trust me on this - Javascript is not the technology you want to use here.
Good stable trustworthy HTML will do the job.

You could learn how to better stucture your PHP code so that you actually enjoy "writing everything up".

Create arrays and use the foreach loop, fetch content from the database once at the top of your script and get it into an associative array. Work through these data arrays logically and generate the needed markup. But this belongs in the PHP forum.